Ruse of the Right

"The politicians in this state are nothing short of rotten/

They buy us off with fancy words and sell us out to cotten."

--from traditional Carolina cotton workers song.

THE RE-ELECTION campaigns of Senators Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) say a lot about the state of the American Right this year. It's not that their likely victories will actually contribute to the much-fabled Shift to the Right. They will not preside over the funeral of the "New South" (a fashionable phrase since at least the 1870s). There will be no total surrender to the beast that just gobbled Michael Dukakis.

But the durability of Thurmond and Helms--and more importantly, their adaptability--has important implications for the no-longer-so-nascent Far Right in American politics.

By all standards, this pair should be politically extinct--confined to the junkheap of rusted-out racists like George Wallace and Lester Maddox. It was Thurmond, after all, who led the Dixiecrat walkout at the 1948 Democratic convention over Harry Truman's modest civil rights proposals and soon earned a reputation as the Senate's foremost segregationist. Television commentator Helms used race to boost him to the Senate in 1972.

But unlike others of their ilk, these two learned the merits of flexibility--a little-recognized characteristic of the New Right. It is, of course, opportunism, not dogmatism, that gives the Right its bite, and Thurmond and Helms are specialists at tailoring their positions to rightwing fashions. Thurmond may perform octogenerian calisthetics, and Helms may run off his mouth in seemingly candid ways, but the iconoclasm is a put-on. Both are skilled professionals when it comes to pushing the panic buttons on issues like the Panama Canal, gun control and the ERA. And both know that while race as a campaign issue has had its day, there are other issues that play on the hopes and fears of working class whites.

They know what's good for them in terms of party politics too. At the appropriate time, both Helms and Thurmond turned from Democrats to Republicans, and although it may come back to haunt Helms (the GOP is on the decline in North Carolina), the metamorphosis has served both well.

Each one was a central figure during the Nixon years--Thurmond as the architect of Nixon's Southern Strategy and Helms as the leader of the rightwing charge needed to create the reactionary climate Nixon wanted.

And they have continued to benefit from the big money politics of the Republican Party, securing campaign contributions from men like W. Clement Stone and textile magnate Roger Milliken, not to mention the millions from Richard Viguerie's direct mail outfit.

What is really at stake for Thurmond and Helms--and Massachusett's Ed King for that matter--is the preservation of their charade. Their future, and the future of the right-wing boom as a whole, depends on the knack of these politicians for plugging into the money and power of corporate America while continuing to sound the horn of the little man fighting high taxes and big government.

In South Carolina, Strom Thurmond emphasizes what he calls his "Little Man's Advocate". "You know where Strom stands--he stands for you," announces his campaign brochure.

In reality, Thurmond has been an aggressive watchdog for corporate interests on several fronts. He fought hard to defeat the labor law reform bill, for example, and has even gone so far as to actively discourage companies that were less than rabidly anti-union from locating in South Carolina.

HIS LIST OF campaign contributions reads like a Who's Who of major textile interests in this heavily textile-oriented state--J.P. Stevens, Dan River, Deering-Milliken, and so on.

Perhaps there is no clearer example of Thurmond's political agility than his relationship with the blacks who make up almost a third of the state's populations. In 1970, recently enfranchised blacks helped defeat a Thurmond protege: Albert Watson--after a blatantly racist gubernatorial campaign. Since then, Thurmond has made several highly visible gestures to woo blacks--sending his children to an integrated school, supporting full Congressional representation for the District of Columbia, steering some patronage to black leaders.

It is a testament to Thurmond's savvy that such maneuvers are likely to prove effective in drawing blacks to Thurmond's campaign, even though he remains as vigorously opposed as ever to any proposals challenging the basic economic structure which has permitted severe poverty to engulf many of South Carolina's blacks.

Jesse Helms is a different political creature, newer to the game and more like the Thurmond of 30 years in the vitriol of his rhetoric. But the charade is similar. Like Thurmond, he identifies himself as a "champion of the little people" while amassing an enormous campaign warchest, much of it from out-of-state business interests (his opponent has dubbed him "the $6 million man").

Not surprisingly, the kinds of issues Helms stresses bear no relation to the concrete problems of the constituency he courts: problems like North Carolina's wage scale, the lowest in the country.

Still, when Helms sounds off with, "Your tax dollars are being used to teach our children cannibalism, wife swapping and the murder of infants," the message is clear, even if voters know the rhetoric is exaggerated. What isn't clear to many North Carolinians is the irony of an attack on Big Government by a man so beholden to Big Business, his denials of that association not withstanding.

If liberals were organized enough to do things like come up with hit lists, Helms would be near the top. He is a leading foe of the ERA, charging that the International Women's Year conference in Houston was dominated by "militant Marxists" and "lesbians." He claims that President Carter sold out to the Russions by cancelling B-1 Bomber production. He led an unsuccessful fight to lift the Rhodesian chrome import ban. His proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion was so strong that it basically outlawed the IUD too.

What will be so interesting to see in Helms's campaign--and in Thurmond's--is whether these emotional issues will be strong enough to stand.

Both Thurmond and Helms face vigorous opponents in November. In North Carolina, Insurance Commissioner John Ingram is tackling Helms after an upset victory over Charlotte banker Luther Hodges in the Democratic primary. Ingram attacked Hodges as the darling of the special interests and is trying to do the same with Helms. He stresses his achievements as a progressive insurance commissioner--the elimination of age, sex and race discrimination in the state's insurance rates, and the investigation of insurance companies that stonewall on workman's compensation payments.

IN SOUTH CAROLINA Charles "Pug" Ravenel '61 is posing the most serious threat to Thurmond in years. A native Charlestonian, Ravenel went from quarterbacking the Harvard football team to the Harvard Business School and on to Wall Street before returning home to run for governor. He won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1974 through an impressive media campaign that included an attack on the State Senate as a "den of thieves." But the State Supreme Court, in a highly questionable interpretation of the state residency requirement, took him off the ballot because he had not lived in South Carolina for the preceding five years.

In the Senate campaign, Ravenel has presented a detailed analysis of Thurmond's record and denounced it as lacking in compassion and hurting the state's economy, especially its working people.

Ingram and Ravenel are both mounting strong challenges, but neither is expected to win. Helms and Thurmond have effectively counterattacked in ways that reveal their political adroltness. Thurmond has rather skillfully made Ravenel out to be the puppet of special interests, though his own out-of-state contributions total more than Ravenel's. Helms has taken a different tack. He ridicules Ingram's obvious lack of sophistication and pictures him as naive and gullible--certainly not the kind of man North Carolinians should trust to hold down the fort against the Russians.

Both responses: depicting Ravenel as a puppet and Ingram as a fool-divert attention from the paradoxical nature of the incumbents' record and rhetoric.

But that's nothing new in Carolina politics.